100/100

[originally written on my blog]

I don't understand how you make a film that looks like this and then go on to make 32 subsequent films (and counting) that look nothing like this. But then, neither do I understand how you achieve the perfect synthesis of your many gifts and somehow conclude that you totally whiffed, to the point where you beg the studio to destroy the negative. Each of the film's tricky balancing acts—between visual beauty and verbal dexterity, between wit and pathos, between the specific and the universal—couldn't be more sublimely realized; like most every masterpiece, it's a tiny, insular story that nonetheless embodies human folly at its most ubiquitous and grandiose. That Woody chooses to make…

“Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat—oh, I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be.”

Is life fundamentally sweet or sour? Depends on your point of view, I suppose. You get a new job, make a new friend, fall in love—life is honeyed and worth living. You lose that job, have a falling out with that friend, fall out of love—life is curdled and should be thrown out. The funny thing is, those circumstances don’t parcel themselves out discretely. They tend to coexist. You get a promotion but have a fight with your spouse about the…

Film #3 of Florin's Recommendations

“I feel like we're in a Noel Coward play. Someone should be making martinis.”

Isaac Davies is the typical Woody Allen character, an underachieving intellectual who is not confident enough to do what he wants to do in life, someone who is living a romantically –and of course sexually- problematic life and seems to struggle with the endless complexities of human relationships, someone who has always been one step away from achieving success but the fear of rejection and the lack of confidence have kept him from reaching greatness and happiness, an individual who is desperately searching for the meaning of life in a time and place where things- thanks to modernization- are changing so…

Few will deny that Woody Allen, as a director, is formulaic as fuck, especially thematically as nine out of ten of his pictures revolve around male-female romances with some oddity about them - often triangular or double-triangular to add extra conflict. Personally though, I really don’t mind since the format appeals to me and Woody’s releases, even his newest, manage to inflict on me the emotions they attempt to inspire: a smile, a bit of warmth and light upset due to characters’ choices and habits. Manhatten, following his most acclaimed feature Annie Hall, may as one of his earliest efforts have rolled out the red carpet for his impressive filmography and this fact is obvious from its romantic-comedy structure. Yet,…

...on the one hand, I can see why Woody Allen is so admired as a filmmaker. Directed like a love-letter to New York City, the film presents a panoramic, nostalgic perspective of the Red Apple, with its Gershwin scores and monochrome wide-angle shots an admirable attempt at capturing Woody's vision. Heavily dialogue-oriented, the film is paced well with breather moments that give it a stop-start momentum that I can get behind.

But my god, Manhattan is insufferable to watch. A rom-com about a shaky love triangle, never did it feel like natural storytelling, but rather Woody trying to stuff his script with as many references, witty in-jokes and name-drops as he possibly can for 90 minutes. This is one of…

Manhattan is a painful reminder than I prefer my Woody Allen films with Woody Allen not in front of the camera. With Annie Hall he was alright, he had a great script to back him up. In this though? It kind of feels like a cheap knock off of Annie Hall at points.

Woody is on an ego trip in this. Women find him desirable, he has threesomes but he has no real positive traits other than throwing off occasional great one liners, like, 'I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics'. That's a great line and there are a couple of others like that. But they are few and far between in this meandering and at…